CH35

Castle headed upstairs into the lions den. This was going to be bad and he knew it.

"I know all of you have questions. And I will answer all of them. This is going to take some time, so try and give me some. I know it will not be easy.

First, Mr. Beckett, this was not how I wanted to meet you, but events have forced my hand. I welcome you to my home.

As all of you know, Kate was shot at some months back while attending the funeral for those 4 officers that had died in the line of duty. What you don't know is that someone wants Beckett dead. Something happened today that caused him to think she knows something. This may or may not be true, but has decided to make sure."

"The Rook case." Kate whispers.

"I believe so. How he fits into this is part of the mystery. If everyone would have a seat and Alexis and myself will get started in our explanation. Please."

Waiting until everyone found someplace to sit. Ryan was with Jenny. Javi was with Lanie. Kate sat on the sectional with Alexis in her lap and Kate without thinking about it wrapped her arms around her and kissed the back of her head.

This action did not go unnoticed by Kate's father. However he decided to remain silent. If his little girl was willing to do that act so naturally, there was something going on here. And it did help explain the smile he had seen on her face ever since they had got here. And that alone made him happy. If this little girl, Lexus?, and this Castle had anything to do with that, he would listen to anything. Anything at all.

"It is time myself and Alexis came clean with you all."

"Castle what is going on? Why have you brought us all here?" Lanie wanted to know.

"Bro, this better be good, or I'm going to hurt you!" Lanie patted Espo's leg to get him to stay calm.

"This is going to be tough to take, so try to give me a chance to finish before everyone goes ballistic on me. It is a little long and complicated."

"To understand the situation you need some perspective. A little history about Alexis and myself, before we talk about why you are all here, now.

Alexis and myself are what we call Eltaran. We were both born on a planet very, very far away from here. There is no "English" word to convert the name of our planet to yours. In our language it is called "Aa-mon". It helps if you try and sing out the name instead of being blunt. Most of our language is based on a kind roll of the tongue resembling singing. For example Alexis's real name is "Ann-thanath-Coranar."

"Castle, we are not interested in one of your stories. Just tell us what is going on. How did we get here?" Javi was losing what little patience he had.

"He's telling the truth! Please believe us! It's, important." Alexis said the latter in a very soft voice that almost not everyone caught, while still sitting on Kate's lap who still had her arms wrapped around her.

Kate was ready to give Castle a piece of her mind in a rebuke to that, but that statement came from Alexis. She could give Castle a piece of her mind about this non-sense, but hearing it from Alexis gave her cause to hold her tongue.

"I know this sounds kind of spacey, kind of like a bad B rated Sci-fi movie, but it is the truth. We were a lot more advanced than you are now. However we had spent the last three (3) generations involved in an interstellar war. The war was using up a lot of our resources and very little was being spent on new technology. To be blunt, we were losing. Slowly maybe, but still losing"

"Bro, I thought you wrote murder mystery, sounds like you missed your calling. You should write Sci-fi for a cable channel. You are wasting our time." And Espo got up with the intent of leaving. But Alexis spoke up again.

"Will you listen to us? We are only trying to save your lives. You go out there and he will pick you up and kill you eventually. You all mean a lot to us and we only want to keep you safe." Alexis was beginning to lose her temper. Why can't these people listen? They are all her friends.

"Sit Javi, we are going to let them finish. You know better than anyone Alexis is right. You step out there and you and Kate are as good as dead. Do you really care that little about Kate?" Lanie really wanted to know.

"Lanie, you know I love Kate. She's like a sister to me. I would do anything to help keep her safe. But this gibberish has no meaning. How can you listen to this dribble?"

"Fine, you explain how we got into Castle's house without driving here. What was that we stepped into, or through, or whatever that was. We were in my Apt. one second and now we are here. So explain or sit down and shut-up or so help me I will smack you so hard, you'll see stars for hours."

Javi had no answer, so he sat down and grumbled something incoherent. (probably in Spanish).

"So you are an 'Alien'?" Ryan asks.

"Well I'm not from Mexico or some other county, but yes, I'm an alien. Just not Grey with big black eyes. Nor can I read minds, or have antenna that will stick up out of the back of my head. And I don't have an intelligent space suit or go nuts when I eat ice cream. And I'm not a cylon."

"Uhm dad." Alexis speaks up.

"Ok, so we go nuts over ice cream. But can you blame us? That stuff is amazing! God i love this planet!"

Jenny finally spoke for the first time, "Continue Castle, if it means we can be safe and my husband comes home to us each day, I want to hear it. And I want to know how we got from our home to here in the blink of an eye. And what did you do to our door?"

"How you got here, was using what we call a 'Transmat'. You send a coded single onto any solid surface and it opens a portal from that location to the location indicated in part of the coded signal you sent. Think of it this way, (as he picks up a piece of paper), I know you have probably seen this before, but what is the fastest distance to get from point A, on this edge of the paper, to point B on the other side of the paper? Normally it would be a straight line, …."

Kate speaks up, "Of course Castle, you bend the paper until the two points join. But this is real life Castle, not some bad movie." Kate may be falling in love with him, but this was just too much to take.

"Correct both times, Kate. However the two points on this paper will never actually touch. No matter how much you bend it they will not touch. So what you need is a kind of door that you open. Like how you get from the living room to the bedroom, you go through a door. Except in this case the door you open can lead you to a lot more places than just the bedroom. You could end up in Ryan's closet, or the dry storage room of a restaurant in Paris, anyplace you can think of. With-in reason."

"If what you say is true, not saying you are, if we got a 911 call about a shooting taking place we could open a door and be at this location in seconds. We could open a door and rescue people trapped in a burning building without waiting for the Fire Dept. to show up." Kate reasons.

"All correct Kate. No more airplanes crashing since you would not need them to travel. No driving to the mall to go shopping, so no drunk drivers to ruin someone's family's life. No offense Jim!"

"None taken. That part of my life is in the past. I have no desire to go back to that life."

"Wait, say this works the way you say. We could step thru this 'door' (using her fingers for a quote sign in the air) and step out into the safe at Fort Knox and be filthy rich." Leave it to Jenny to think of money thinks Ryan.

"True, provided you know where to take the gold and what to do with it after you got it, but yes. However there is a technology to prevent the door from opening into a place you don't want it to. Problem is, you need to keep this 'Wall' up constantly and this requires a fair amount of power to maintain."

"Figures!" Jenny is now bummed her idea is shot down.

"Don't be sad Jenny. Even if you did get all the gold in Fort Knox you would need a way to keep someone else with this technology from taking it from you after you went to all the trouble to get it." Is Ricks response.

"And pop goes the bubble." says Ryan, who bends over to kiss his wife as compensation. Jenny responds by 'Huffing' and stroking his cheek.

"Castle, how did you get here?" Kate wanted to know. If he really is an 'ET' he must have quite a story. Just hope it's a true one and not one of his fictional stories.

"I was a writer even back then. Before we traveled here. However instead of Murder Mystery fiction like I write now, I wrote Biographies of other people that were involved in dramatic times or places. I was married to my wife, 'Elear-Parma-Tar'. She loved children. She kept telling me she wanted to be forever pregnant. She was a teacher and just loved children. She wanted enough children to fill her classroom and teach all of them all she knew. We had been married for two years and had been trying for children the entire time. But it was just not working out. She was becoming very sad and despondent about the whole thing. I did the best I could to keep her hopes up but it wasn't easy. Then one day she was beaming and told me she thought she was pregnant. So we went to the hospital to confirm it."

"Alexis!?" Kate whispered, and held her just a little closer to her and kissed the back of her head, again. And Rick only nodded his head.

"She was so happy, but she really wanted twins or even triplets. Anything to speed up the process. However being pregnant was hard on her. She was tired most of the time, Morning sickness was terrible, I could hardly get her to eat anything the entire time. She spent most of her time in bed. She spent almost 36 of your hours in labor. It was draining for her, I was afraid I was going to lose her during delivery. Finally Alexis here arrived and she was perfect. Perfectly healthy even with all my worries. But after she was delivered Elear-Parma-Tar started to bleed, badly, really badly."

He could hear Lanie catch her breath, as she knew what that meant. "Oh, god".

"They got the bleeding under control, but she was very weak. She was going to have to stay in the hospital for several days to come. Possibly weeks. Alexis was healthy and could come home with me the next day. Lucky for me she took to bottle feeding immediately. I spent part of my days at home with Alexis and the rest of the day in the hospital with my wife."

"I got an assignment to do a small biography about the pilots and crew of the 'Colony Ship' "Ever Green" that was in orbit and scheduled to leave in a week's time. It had a crew of 22 and a passenger load of around 16,000. It was a self contained ship, everything you would ever need was already on-board. As were all of the passengers when I started the assignment. I had decided to take Alexis with me to the interviews. I thought having a baby along would get most of them to relax and answer my questions while they eewed and awwed over how beautiful and cute Alexis was."

"I started off with the two pilots and the flight engineer. We were just waiting for the flight engineer to arrive. The pilots were both women, which was not unusual. They were also pilots for a warship named 'The Pearl", or 'Mother of Pearl'. The women were calling it 'Mom' which I learned was an affectionate reference to the ship. To you it would have been a 'Frigate' Class. It was one of the two Frigates in orbit. The other ship was called 'The Teak'. My idea of bringing Alexis with me seemed to be working out like I had hoped. The women just could not stop talking to her. They would ask questions about Alexis and I would ask questions about them."

"Rick, how are they going to be pilots of a warship if they were leaving on a colony ship?" Jim asked.

"A lot of warships have rotational crews. Similar to your boomer subs. There is a Gold, Blue and Red crew. One crew is on board, while one is off duty and the other is on stand-by. The plan was for them to fly the colony ship out and take one of the two long range shuttles, attached to the colony ship, back along with the crew that was not staying. They would still get a rotation off of flight duties and fulfill the requirements needed of the colony ship."

"16,000 people does not seem enough to start a colony with Castle" Lanie stated.

"True, but it was just the first of the 3 scheduled colony ships routed to the same planet in another system".

"How long was it expected to take to get there?" Was Jim's next question.

"All our ships have what we call a 'Star Drive', or FTL if you prefer."

"FTL?" asked Jenny.

"Faster than light" responded Rick.

"Flight time was expected to be 9 months. The first two weeks would have been spent just getting out of our solar system before using the FTL."

"Why so long?" asked Jim.

"Our Star Drive requires you to be out of the systems gravity well in order to engage the drive. If you don't you could find yourself arriving inside of some planet. Or the computer could not compensate for the gravity the systems star generates and end up a long, long ways away from where you intended to be. Possibly where we have no star map information about where you are. Let alone how to get back. Or explode instantly. BOOM!"

"So, you got on the colony ship and came here?" Kate now asks.

"Not exactly. Or yes and no" Rick responds.

Kate gives him her best confused look, expecting a better explanation.

Rick takes in a deep breath and lets it out slowly (this is going to be hard to go thru again) "While I was interviewing the pilots they got an urgent launch alert over the communication set each had on them. They asked for a clarification. While I was watching they went from worried to scared shit less. I could only hear their end of the conversation, not who was on the other end. They jumped up suddenly and said they had to go, NOW! Then they opened a transmat wall to leave. Just before they walked thru they both stopped and looked at each other, then turned around and grabbed me while I was holding Alexis and shoved me thru the 'door" they had opened."

"They didn't give you any kind or warning or tell you where you were going?" Kate asked. And she could see that tears were starting to form in his eyes. Something bad was coming up.

Rick just shook his head. "No, next thing I knew I was in what looked like a cockpit of a ship. Not that I had ever been in one, but it looked like what I would imagine one to look like. Plus there were windows and I could see open space."

"What ship did you end up on?" was Kates next question.

"The colony ship, 'The Evergreen'. I was immediately mad and started yelling at them. I was cursing and telling them every nasty thing I could think of. They just grabbed me and shoved me into an empty seat up front. I was trying hard to keep a hold on Alexis while trying to get answers. One of the women jumped into the other seat and next thing I knew I was getting sleepy and having trouble keep a firm hold on my new born daughter."

"I found out later that the other pilot had given me an injection to calm me down, behind my back."

"A mild sedative" Lanie whispered. Rick could only shrug his shoulders.

"I was still conscious and knew what was going on, just couldn't really talk well or move much. They spent a lot of time talking with 'Mom' and 'The Teak'. Seems our enemy had broken thru our lines and were pouring through like a dam had broken and spreading out. With a large portion headed our way. It was going to be a race as to see if the 'Evergreen' could get out of the system gravity well to use the 'Star Drive' before they intercepted us.

Compared to the warships the colony ship was rather slow. Mom and The Teak could have gotten out of the system in less than half the time it was going to take us.

"They gave me the room meant for the flight engineer since he did not make it onto the ship. They kept bringing me up to the flight deck and kept me updated on what was happening. They said they wanted me to write about it for the future if we made it."